How This Chef Paved Her Own Untraditional Path To Restaurant Ownership

Samantha Fore is the owner/chef at Tuk Tuk , a Sri Lankan pop-up and restaurant in Lexington, Kentucky. With no background in the culinary industry, Fore carved her own path, starting as a website designer for high-end restaurants. She learned her way around food by tasting and observing, and was invited to cook at esteemed kitchens around the country. Endorsements from Padma Lakshmi of “Top Chef,” daytime cooking segments and magazines led her to establish herself as a chef supporting more diversity and equality in the restaurant industry.

In this edition of Voices in Food , Fore talks about some of the challenges she faced as an immigrant, female, brown and inexperienced chef who took a less traditional approach to entering the industry. 

I was born in Kentucky and raised in North Carolina. While working in the advertising industry in Boston, my exposure to food was minimal. I remember a particular day roughly 12 years ago when I responded to a job posting on Twitter. James Beard Award-winning chef Jamie Bissonnette at Coppa restaurant was looking for a website designer. I thought I was highballing when I offered my services and asked that dinner be included in my remuneration. Little did I know that those initial meals would be an early culinary education for me.

Until that point, I didn’t know how to eat or order at acclaimed fine-dining restaurants. My folks came from Sri Lanka, and we had never seen butchered pig tails, Italian small plates and the world’s finest wines. I came to learn about food by watching and eating Bissonnette’s creations. He was impressed with my aptitude and referred me to his friends. As I started to design more websites for other high-end restaurants, I learned about creating menus, setting up properties, hiring policies and designing collateral. 

Living in Boston was cost-prohibitive. When my husband and I moved back to Kentucky in 2012, I thought cooking would enable us to meet new people and make new friends. So, I started cooking Sri Lankan food that I grew up eating, sourcing local Southern produce, while incorporating cooking techniques I learned from watching my clients. Dinner with friends turned into packed brunches at home, and then a pop-up restaurant. People who had never tried Sri Lankan cuisine loved Sri Lankan Bites ’ coconut sambal and curried deviled eggs. 

But I really didn’t have any practical experience cooking in a chef’s kitchen or running a restaurant business. And I didn’t have the funds to take risks. I thought about what’s the lowest investment I could make, and spent $572 in equipment for a temporary food establishment. The equipment was a canopy tent from Walmart with three sides that became a 10-by-10 pop-up restaurant at a bar.

Initially, I did not expand even to farmers markets because it cost $175 for booth rental and I had no way of securing a guaranteed return. But the word spread through central Kentucky and beyond. Six months later, I was a guest chef cooking Sri Lankan-inspired pop-up dinners at professional kitchens, alongside award-winning, highly respected chefs across the country. I was traveling to cook at the top of mountains, James Beard kitchens, Derby’s and whatnot! 

Initially, it was really tough to earn my colleagues’ respect in the kitchen. They would say: “You haven’t gone to culinary school or worked in a professional kitchen, do you even belong here?” One chef jeopardized my dinner by stealing my recipe book, and another resigned after seeing how the guests appreciated my food more than his. I also had moments when chefs would invite me in, only to chew me out over something their dishwasher did. Sometimes, I would play a joke and introduce myself as “the dishwasher,” which many times seemed more believable than “chef.” 

But I learned how to toughen up for the sake of my food and people. I kept proving myself over and over again, because I did not have a brick-and-mortar restaurant to return to. Also, I was representing my community through my cooking. As a Sri Lankan kid raised in the ’80s in the Southeast, my family and I had always felt alone. There were negative perceptions of our country and not a lot of awareness of our food. Through my food, I sought acceptance. I worked 10 times as hard as others and fought hard to be visible.

It’s hard to make your own highway, but when you take a chance, somehow everything becomes a new adventure and more worthwhile in the end.

One of the defining points in my career was when I was teaching cooking at the nonprofit social enterprise Emma’s Torch. I worked with refugee people who had been through war, human trafficking, and all kinds of difficult situations. They were starting afresh, not even knowing English, but with a common language of food. One of the women learning to make coconut roti from me was fleeing for her life in Ukraine just months ago. I thought that people are constantly uprooting and changing their whole lives, yet we in the restaurant industry often cannot figure out how to be nice to each other!

I want to ensure that we foster communities where people are heard and respected. I work with chefs looking for reasons to love cooking again after being burned out, and those who have survived abuse in the workplace. I also want to open doors for other women of color in the culinary industry. We need to be paid fairly and not get pigeonholed. We should not be taken advantage of, or told that we should be grateful for the opportunities we got. We should extend basic human decencies and value each other for who we are, inclusive of races and genders. 

Alongside Keiko Tanaka , I teach about the availability of food and the role I play in my culture through a sociology of cuisine course at the University of Kentucky. But this topic doesn’t concern only Sri Lanka. There are many parallels across other cultures too. Growing up as a first-generation Sri Lankan in the South, I don’t feel completely at home over there or here. But oftentimes my identity is reduced to just one, because that’s how society works. I want to be known as a brown chef in the South, as a Sri Lankan Southerner. Can people weave me into the cultural identity of this region?

I ask people in the culinary industry to open their hearts, minds and kitchens, and make space for diversity. If they recognize and appreciate the commonalities, they will be able to build better, more expansive and inclusive businesses.